An Inventory of Her Papers at the Harry Ransom
Center

The Doris Lessing Papers document the
English author's creative life through artwork, clippings, correspondence, galley
proofs, journal pages, libretti, manuscripts, notes, objects, page proofs,
photographs, play scripts, printed material, screenplays, and sound recordings.
The
focus of the collection is on her professional rather than personal
life.

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 to English parents who were resident in Persia (now
Iran) at the time. Her father, Alfred Tayler, was a bank employee. The family
lived
in Persia until Doris was five years old, when her father bought a farm in what
was
then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Lessing spent the next 25 years in Africa,
marrying and divorcing twice and having three children before she took her youngest
child, Peter, and moved to England in
1949.

The next year her first novel, The Grass Is Singing,
was published. She supported herself and her son by writing poetry, articles,
stage
plays, screenplays for television and film, short stories, and novels, including
the
Children of Violence novel series (1952-1969).
Her best-known novel, The Golden Notebook, was
published in 1962 and established her for life among the most prominent writers
in
England.

In the 1960s, Lessing came under the influence of Sufi writer and teacher Idries
Shah. As a result, her work veered away from realism in The
Four-Gated City (1969), Briefing for a Descent
into Hell (1971), The Memoirs of a
Survivor (1974), and especially the science-fiction novel series, Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1982), to the dismay of
some of her readers. Even though she occasionally returned to more realistic methods
in some of her later work, for the rest of her career Lessing often chose
unconventional paths, as in the graphic novel Playing the
Game (1995), Mara and Dann: An Adventure
(1999), The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot
and the Snow Dog (2006), and The Cleft
(2007).

Also unconventional in a different way were the two novels that Lessing wrote and
secretly published under the pseudonym Jane Somers--The Diary
of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could…
(1984). Only she and her agent Jonathan Clowes (and later her American
editor, Robert Gottlieb, who was so familiar with her work that he immediately
guessed her authorship) knew of the ruse. She explained that she wanted to
demonstrate how difficult it had become for a young author to be published.

Lessing collaborated with American composer Philip Glass on operatic versions of two
of her novels, The Making of the Representative for Planet
8 (1988) and The Marriages between Zones Three,
Four, and Five (1997).

She also produced a significant amount of nonfiction, including African Laughter (1992), a memoir of four visits to
Zimbabwe; the two volumes of her autobiography, Under My
Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade
(1997); and a collection of her nonfiction writing, Time
Bites (2004).

Lessing received many awards in her long career including the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 2007. She died at age 94 in 2013.

Lessing, Doris. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography,
to 1949. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Lessing, Doris. Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My
Autobiography, 1949-1962. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

The Doris Lessing Papers document the English author's creative life through artwork,
clippings, correspondence, galley proofs, journal pages, libretti, manuscripts,
notes, objects, page proofs, photographs, play scripts, printed material,
screenplays, and sound recordings. The focus of the collection is on her
professional rather than personal life. The papers are arranged in two series:
I.
Works, 1943-2008, undated, and II. Personal and Career-Related, 1947-2007,
undated.

Lessing's papers were acquired by the Ransom Center in two lots: one accession was
assembled under her personal supervision in 1999 and has been available to
researchers through a preliminary inventory; the other was acquired under the
terms
of her will in 2015. The present arrangement re-catalogs the earlier acquisition
and
combines both accessions. To make it possible for users to identify which accession
included a particular item, folders containing material from the 1999 accession
are
labeled with registration numbers R14457 or R16015; folders containing material
from
the 2015 accession are not labeled with an accession number.

The papers clearly illustrate Lessing's usual working method. After some preliminary
handwritten notes, she composed her first draft at the typewriter, making a carbon
copy. Then she revised both copies by hand before sending one to a typist for
retyping, requesting an original and usually several carbon copies or, in later
years, word-processed printouts. This process of editing and retyping was often
repeated several times before she submitted the manuscript to her publisher. This
guide refers to each of these stages of the manuscript as a "draft," and these drafts are arranged in
chronological order based on internal evidence (Lessing did not date her
manuscripts). Thus "first draft" means the earliest
version present among her papers, not necessarily the earliest draft that she
put
down on paper (for example, if a version has been lost).

In the process of revising a draft, Lessing sometimes re-typed longer passages on
small pieces of paper rather than writing them by hand (she recognized that her
handwriting was difficult to read, saying people told her it was "ghastly") and paper-clipped them to the original
page. To prevent these slips of paper from becoming misplaced and to preserve
information about their original location, the paper-clipped revision was
photocopied, the paper clips were removed, and the photocopy, small slips, and
original page were slipped into a plastic sleeve. This was done only if the
correction was typed on small pieces of paper; if the correction was typed on
a
full-size sheet, it was merely left in place and the paper clip removed.

Lessing frequently typed her drafts on the back of previously used paper; sometimes
incoming correspondence, unfinished outgoing correspondence, and manuscripts of
other works. No attempt was made to identify and catalog this material.

Often Lessing filed correspondence to and from her typist, publisher, or others with
her manuscripts. Such letters were left in place and arranged in chronological
order. Significant individual correspondents are included in the Index of
Correspondents at the end of this guide.

Lessing's original folders are preserved and filed behind the material they
originally enclosed.

Subseries A. Novels contains material for all of Lessing's novels beginning with
The Four-Gated City (1969). She explained that
all earlier material had been lost.

The novels are arranged in alphabetical order by title.

Included are drafts of an uncompleted novel, The Memorymakers, which was intended
for
serial publication in Ink magazine until it folded and Lessing
abandoned the project.

The bound proof copy of If the Old Could … contained
dozens of torn slips of paper marking Lessing's corrections. These slips were
marked
with corresponding page numbers and removed to a separate envelope.

While most of Lessing's papers were not particularly well organized beyond being
grouped by title, the manuscript of The Cleft was in
such confusion that no attempt was made to reorder it during processing at the
Ransom Center.

Subseries B. Short Fiction is arranged in alphabetical order by title, with
individual stories and book-length collections grouped separately.

Subseries C. Dramatic works includes stage and musical plays, screenplays for
television and film, and opera librettos. Many of the works in this section had
not
been published when this guide was written. They are arranged in a single
alphabetical list by title.

Many of the manuscripts in this section bear the imprint of Gregson & Wigan,
who were apparently her theatrical agents until the firm was purchased by EMI
in
1970. Presumably these scripts were returned to her at that time.

At some point (perhaps when they were still in the possession of her agent) several
of Lessing's manuscripts of dramatic works were stained by an unidentified liquid
that permeated the pages and their folders. These manuscripts have been sleeved
in
plastic. Patrons using them may wish to consult Ransom Center staff about
precautions they can take to avoid direct contact with these materials.

Subseries D. Poetry is the smallest section of Lessing's works. Most of her poems
were written early in her career, though she occasionally wrote and published
verse
as late as 2005. Lessing herself labeled a folder "The ones I like," and that
arrangement is preserved here. An attempt was made to arrange drafts in
chronological order during processing.

Subseries E. Nonfiction contains articles, essays, journalism, reviews, prefaces,
and
other writing grouped as either individual pieces or books. Many of the individual
manuscripts in this section lack titles; where the same piece appeared in the
anthology Time Bites, the title found there is the one under which the piece is
cataloged; otherwise, the title written on the manuscript, if any, was chosen.
Untitled and uncompleted pieces are grouped at the end.

After her 1986 visit to Pakistan to learn about refugees from the Russian invasion
of
Afghanistan, Lessing wrote about her experiences in two simultaneous publications:
an article, The Catastrophe, published in The
New Yorker, and a book, The Wind Blows Away Our
Words, published in England. Because these two publications included
essentially the same material, all drafts were filed together under the book title,
and only galley proofs under the article title.

Series II. Personal and Career-Related encompasses five boxes and is divided into
two
subseries: A. Personal, 1947-2007, undated, and B. Career-Related, 1956-2002,
undated.

The Personal subseries contains some loose pages with dated, journal-like entries.
A
portion of these describes Lessing's experience taking the drug mescaline in 1963.
These pages were originally placed by Lessing among her poems, but since no
connection with any of the poems could be discovered, they were moved to this
section.

The Personal subseries also contains correspondence that was not filed in conjunction
with any particular manuscript or other group of papers.

The Career-Related subseries contains clippings, photocopies, and printed
publications containing reviews of Lessing's work, profiles, and interviews, as
well
as documents and correspondence relating to her travels to give readings and talks
and to receive awards.

Other repositories with holdings of Lessing's papers include the British Archive for
Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia and the Department of Special
Collections and University Archives at the University of Tulsa.

One audio recording was transferred to the Ransom Center Sound Recordings
Collection.

One original print was transferred to the Ransom Center Art Collection.

Two books were transferred to the Ransom Center Library and are listed in the University of Texas Library Catalog.

A small number of miscellaneous objects was transferred to the Ransom Center Personal
Effects Collection.